Month: April 2024

Can you speak for yourself?

~ fastcaranalysis ~ Leave a comment

Strange events continue to unfold across America. I was struck recently by a video that I watched. It was a video of a completely inarticulate group of students at a university in Georgia. In fact, they were so inarticulate that I don’t know what they were complaining about. The video began with a senator that was visiting a class. Students became upset by something that they thought was worth complaining to the senator about. Rudely. But none of them could articulate a single idea of their own. One by one they brought up their phone screen with text that they could read loudly as they exited the classroom. I still don’t know what their beef was. I wonder if they know.

That brings me to ponder the influence of narratives in modern life. Good stories begin with something real. Hemmingway said to all writers everywhere that the way to write well is to write one good sentence that is true, then expand out into narrative from there. What happens if you can’t do that first part? What if you don’t know what’s true?

That may be the terrible conundrum of those Georgia students. In the deluge of information that is pouring out narratives that mostly aren’t true, it can be hard to know anything that is true. And if you have lost a sense of what’s true for you, if you’ve lost even relative truth, you can’t use relative truth to backtrack to absolute truth that you are confident about. Truth matters because reality matters. Parroting what can be found on the internet doesn’t count as having an informed point of view. Instead, that can be just reading propaganda.

I’m sure you’ve heard of the strategy called “divide and conquer.” If you want to destroy social solidarity, one way to do it is to encourage people to pick one of two opposing sides. In war, that’s easy. Pick a side. Rationalize about which side should win. Then yell loudly for the side you want to win. A long time ago, Sun Tsu (544 BC) said that all wars are based on deception. In 1918, in the U.S., Senator Hiram Johnson said that the first casualty of war is truth. I’m sure others have said this. Will wars go on forever if you can’t find a true reason to stop the war (because you can’t witness any part of it or know whether stories you hear about the war are true)?

Do you ever feel tangled in narratives? I’m against censorship because getting untangled from opposing and differing narratives is easier when people can point out where the story doesn’t make sense or isn’t true. What if young people who have a lot of screen time, don’t know where to begin to untangle opposing narratives? What if they don’t feel that they know enough to declare their own personal position? What if they aren’t confident that they can find a truth that will calm their sense of controvery and upheaval? That would make them feel less powerful and more frustrated. Like the students in Georgia.

Truth is powerful. And it’s easier to find truth when it’s right in front of you. That’s one of my complaints about globalization. Distant wars have a lot of tangled narratives but no way to untangle the lies from the truth or even to recognize what may be true or untrue. I’m not in favor of sending money to distant wars.

Buy a copy of Political Catsup with Economy Fries available at Amazon.com.

Narrative is distorted in non-issue politics also. In U.S. party politics, the Democrat Party and Republican Party have evolved into some extreme positions that oppose each other. Issues such as gun contol and abortion for example used to be called non-issues that would strongly engage the electorate and grab their attention. But the idea of non-issues was only to engage not to have consensus.

Non-issues split the electorate 50% on each side. They are hot button issues. As the role of government has become more intrusive in people’s lives, control has become the goal and moving that way instead of toward consensus is where the pursuit of non-issue hot button politics has led us. Unfortunately. Both the Democrat and Republican parties like people to fight over non-issues because those are issues that divide and conquer the American electorate, wasting political energy. In the meantime, both parties are bankrupting the United States Treasury and destroying the monetary system. Would this have happened if people could articulate a political position without taking an extreme viewpoint that strongly opposes the other 50% of the electorate?

If you feel that you can’t articulate your political position except to say yeah what she said or yeah what he said, you can improve by keeping a daily journal where you write down what happened to you each day and what you thought about it. When you have a question, write it in your journal and go research an answer. Later, when someone asks what you think, you’ll be able to tell them.

Warring against know how in the American workplace

~ fastcaranalysis ~ Leave a comment

How many people do you know who have approached their careers with careful attention to developing their competencies only to be bullied out of the American workforce? The answer for me is a whole lot of them.

Almost everyone I know who I respected as a significant contributor who conscientiously and carefully gave their best effort day after day have been pushed out of their job. They have had their careers ended not just by buy-outs but also by a new manager philosophy. This neoliberal philosophy is profit first even if the final outcome is destruction of the enterprise’s good reputation and the end of the enterprise.

I personally know nurses, librarians, managers, teachers, scientists, bank loan processors, retail salesmen and probably others. These employees were pushed out because they insisted on telling the truth about the workplace. Also because they were trying to achieve excellent outcomes. And because they had consideration for fellow employees and customers. They also had good mental attention for doing the job as it was meant to be done as supported by the mission of the workplace. They specifically became educated and trained in order to do excellent work. These kinds of workers have been banned in many American job sites. Knowledge worker competency is no longer wanted in America. In the effort to boost profits and change every policy in the interest of profits American enterprises have been ignoring ordinary good sense and safety and getting rid of people who behave with a conscience.

I haven’t been motivated to write about this before today but I do so in response to a great article that I read. The title of the article is: “Suicide mission: What Boeing did to all the guys who remember how to build a plane,” by Maureen Tkacik, Mar 28, 2024, from The American Prospect: Ideas, Politics and Power, (https://prospect.org/infrastructure/transportation/2024-03-28-suicide-mission-boeing/?fbclid=IwAR2FGVrz6QFhEcB1nXdBxMUGvt3u9O55w0lfAMt1DS1ploRaw7c3VbmKGuQ_aem_AcX16zTCFmG5LqceRQiYUy96WdT6B6kElQkZ-haDVjcQIA0dmHY0LKwj_pjNkMcF5RY). This article is a great place to start understanding why the new management strategy needs to end.

This article captures the feeling of workplace hopelessness at Boeing that a great thirty year quality and safety inspector engineer named John Barnett experienced. It described his testimony about the workplace policies that made it impossible for him to continue making safety contributions. John Barnett was making a legal desposition about the troubles at Boeing when he was found dead. He didn’t get to give his third day of testimony. It is clear that John described workplace bullying. And it’s undeniable that bullying escalated to a bullet in John Barnett’s temple. Some say suicide and others say murder.

Putting it mildly, I don’t think that this was ok. It wasn’t ok for John Barnett, it wasn’t ok for any of us who want to ride in an airplane and it wasn’t ok for Boeing. It wasn’t ok for the many dead people from two separate total death Boeing plane crashes.

It shows that the new manager style is tragic and terrible and we should stop it. The choice of sacrificing a company in the interest of a short-term manager profit is called the principle agent problem and it is a form of control fraud.

The CEO made money in the millions, the stock went up in price benefitting share holders and the company many once revered and that John Barnett made a huge effort to save, to correct, to improve may never be successful again. John Barnett died while he was trying to tell this story.

I have to say here that I think that stock price increases don’t make up for the losses that were externalized to others. And I would say that is true even if an insurance company can pay off the families that lost their family member. I would say that even if employees that are bullied out can find another job. I would say that no matter what the stock sales buy in the form of lifestyle.

We should also realize that the American workplace has been seriously harmed under this neoliberal policy set. Good workers who could contribute to make enterprises succeed, can’t do that anymore. Also remember the doctors, nurses, firemen, teachers and others that were dismissed because they wouldn’t take a covid vaccine. They were also sidelined because they were good at their jobs and had a conscience.

If you want to learn how neoliberalism got started, where it came from and what its tragedies are beyond the Boeing tragedy, buy a copy of Political Catsup with Economy Fries at amazon.com. I explain how we started with classical liberalism, moved to modern liberalism and now are experiencing the unpleasantness of neoliberalism.

A final comment I’d like to make is that most ordinary jobs in this country have experienced this radical management change under discussion here. While some jobs are under corporations, others are in government. In a fascist system where private industry partners with government, radical destructive changes can remodel the old systems that produced a stable and productive economy in the direction of new systems that have control fraud or that have been redirected towards corrupt political goals. It is hard for work-a-day people to stop this change. Many Americans feel frustrated.